New America

New America is dedicated to the renewal of American politics, prosperity, and purpose in the digital age through big ideas, technological innovation, next generation politics, and creative engagement with broad audiences.

In his first address to Congress, George Washington called for the creation of a national university. In the latest in New America’s Big Ideas series on CNN.com, Kevin Carey says it’s time to use 21st century information technology to make Washington’s 1796 vision for a national university a reality.

American higher education is in crisis. But the disruptive power of information technology is about to change all that. Join Kevin Carey and Marian Wang for a conversation about the end of college, and what comes next.

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But Tuesday's speech strains that bipartisan support more than almost anything else that has happened in recent years. Fifty-five members of Congress boycotted the speech, which some have dismissed as an election stunt and others call a direct slam against President Barack Obama as his administration tries to work out an agreement over nuclear weapons with Iran.

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In many cases, changing minds often came down to semantics — tweaking the vocabulary around issues of gender equity and women’s empowerment. In Farsi, “gender” has a loaded sexual connotation, explained Samira Hamidi, a representative from the Afghan Women’s Network. There was, Reshteen suggested, confusion about what “gender” means in a political context — as a way of simply referring to women’s roles in society. Development goals were the vehicle through which much of the advocacy took off, consistent with Afghan priorities. So the term “gender equality” became “ social equality.”

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A year ago, we were struck by three things about the modernization of the Chinese military: the incredibly rapid growth in its new capabilities and technology, as it moved into a new phase of pushing its own research and development, the wealth of pictures and other information floating around the Internet that could document what previously would’ve have been secret, and the lack of conversation about this amazing development that has such huge implications for fields ranging from geopolitics to science. So we decided to run an experiment, to explore whether we could unearth breaking and significant advances in Chinese military technology and operations, but solely from open source information, and bring them to a global audience.

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Julian Zelizer, a Princeton historian and the author of a new book on the 1960s expansion of the safety net, said the closest analogy might be Reconstruction and the reaction to it. An enormous federal effort initially succeeded in expanding civil rights in the South, only to be reversed in later years. The reversal lasted decades. Reconstruction is obviously a charged, and imperfect, analogy. (For one thing, the people who would lose health insurance now would be predominantly white Southerners.) But the fact that no better precedent comes to mind underscores the highly unusual nature of what could happen at the Supreme Court.